Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Reported an article in
Ecological Economics
,
“[b]y changing the preferences of
people away from meat consumption to
more efficient foods like soy, a positive
environmental impact can be made
worldwide, as well as creating healthier
lives and decreasing the impact of health
problems on a society.”
2
farmed pigs, chickens, and other animals—not to treat illness, but
to speed their growth and try to prevent disease contraction in the
overcrowded, unsanitary conditions customary in today's inten-
sive facilities—led the European Union more than a decade ago to
ban the nontreatment use of antibiotics of human importance in
farmed animal production. In the United States, however, nearly
twenty classes of antimicrobials are approved for farmed animal
growth promotion, according to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC), including many critically important antibiot-
ics, such as penicillin, tetracycline, and erythromycin. Estimates
from the Union of Concerned Scientists reveal that 70 percent of
antimicrobials used in the United States are fed to farmed animals
for nontherapeutic purposes. Aquatic farmed animals, too, are fed
antibiotics. The U.S. fish farming industry consumes a shocking
50,000 pounds of the drugs in a single year.
What does this mean for our health? Antibiotic-resistant
bacteria.
It's scary to consider and even scarier to realize it's a reality: in-
discriminate use of antibiotics in today's factory farming systems
has allowed bacteria to become more resistant to the antibiotics
used to treat us when we're ill. Studies have shown that antibiotic-
resistant bacteria—and antibiotics themselves—can be found in
